Welcome to the travel edition of the Samadhi Brief...
Contributing Authors: John Freeman, Fred McClimans

TRIP up on M&A Buzz

Travel site TripAdvisor (NASDAQ:TRIP) closed yesterday's trading session +6.1% after news came out that its Chairman, Greg Maffei, touted M&A attractiveness as a basis for the stock having limited downside. Potential suitors listed were Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA). We strongly agree, and listed TRIP as one of our top 10 tech M&A targets for 2017 with Priceline (NASDAQ:PCLN), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and AMZN as the most suitable acquirers.

Nvidia & Microsoft GPU Accelerator; AMD & Microsoft Cloud; Qualcomm & Microsoft Cloud

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) spoke yesterday at the 2017 Open Compute Project U.S. Summit, revealing a number of partnerships that bolster its open source hardware initiative titled Project Olympus. Of note:

• Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) will make available its Xeon Processors;
• AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) will contribute its Naples server CPUs, due out in Q2;
• Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and Cavium (NASDAQ:CAVM) will contribute ARM CPUs, with the former contributing its 10nm Centriq 2400 processors; and
• Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has created a hyperscale GPU accelerator blueprint that will create GPUs capable of facilitating AI computing through the cloud.

Microsoft has continually built an impressive cloud infrastructure that has lent it a dominant position, rivaled only by Amazon at present.

Source: Azure Blog

In case you missed it...

Facebook clones another SNAP (NYSE:SNAP) feature

FB has copied SNAP's stories feature on its Messenger app, which allows users to post pictures and videos that expire after 24 hours. Good for FB, but is there too much overlap between Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger looming?

CA (NASDAQ:CA) acquires app-security provider Veracode

CA is acquiring Veracode for $614m in cash, its third acquisition in the last five months (BlazeMeter, Automic Holding GmbH).

AMZN in talks with Middle East retailer

AMZN has been linked (again) as a potential suitor to Middle East online e-tailer (and competitor) Souq.com. The market for the Middle East is heating up and we expect more VC and M&A activity.

SoftBank (SFTBY) sells 25% of its ARM Holdings (ARMH) stake to its Vision Fund

SoftBank, which acquired ARM for nearly $33b in July, divested one quarter of its stake to its newly established Vision Fund. The biggest Vision Fund investor is Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which has pledged $45b of the targetted $100b.